How Spirits Peceive the Physical World"Now

Would you like Walter to tell you about how discarnate spirits see, and hear, and experience other sensations?""Yes please.""Walter will tell you first about the mind's consciousness of reality, as opposed to the reality of the material body. This holds true whether the person is living on earth or in the afterlife. After all, you'll have the same mind after death as you have now.The mind knows reality through non-material senses which during life on earth we experienceas intuition and empathy. Both are forms of love, and give immediate awareness of the nature of other things and people. Empathy has wide implications; for instance on earth it gives a craftsman knowledge of the nature of the material he is working with. It is not until, as discarnate spirits, they are entirely dependent on these senses that people realise they have always used them, and that they can serve perfectly well without the help of the material senses.The material body knows the reality of the world around it through the senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, and two others less well understood - the senses of time and location. (Location is sensed magnetically - you know that birds use it when they migrate -while time is known through the rate of impressions taken in; the quicker impressions are received the more time is stretched to accommodate them, so it seems to pass more slowly).Clocks are man-made, and measure time as it is for mankind as a whole, and as indicated by the movement of heavenly bodies - like the twenty-four hours it takes the earth to revolve on its axis, or the year it takes to go round the sun. Clocks don't tell the time, but record rates of change. They don't have validity outside human experience - the earth doesn't need clocks to tell it how to spin! For the individual, time can seem to vary speeding up when you are happy and slowing tediously when you are bored. It also slows dramatically in moments of crisis like a car crash, when impressions come in at a much faster rate. (This is for survival, to give youtime to get away from danger).That's how the material body senses it's world. As Walter has told you, things are different for the mind.The discarnate spirit sees through the power of love - yes love. This allows it to know the nature of things at first hand. From the new spirit's point of view, it just finds it is able to see,even though it has no material eyes! The seeing is less uniform than it used to be, and you could say we only see something if we look at it - rather as on earth you only notice the first raindrops on the windscreen of a car if you look at them, instead of through them, as you do when you are driving with your eyes focused on the road.But do not imagine that spirits see the world less well than you do; we see it as immeasurably more beautiful, for not only do we see all the same form and colour, we also see the marvellously subtle colours and changing shapes of the magnetic shells or auras - the Ethericbody - which surround and envelop every living thing.The earth is too beautiful to describe and we love it so much! People are also the most beautiful things, clothed in such splendour that, as Jesus Christ said of flowers, ('the lilies of the field'), 'Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.' You on earth, who have seen black, brown, white or yellow skin only in its nakedness, or covered with clothes, without it's garment of iridescent aura, have no idea how beautiful the human form can be. Babies and young children, in particular, are radiant. Later in life the Etheric body becomes disfigured if the life has been selfish and unloving, for the aura expresses the psychic condition of the person. Those people on earth who can see auras confirm this.I asked whether old and ugly people looked beautiful too, for they often don't seem so to us on earth."Don't you understand? It depends upon their psychic state. It's the soul we're looking at, not just the body.""Yes, I do see now.""Spirits also hear with the ears of love. When on earth you hear a sound, you actually hear the spirit of it as well as the 'noise'. Music-lovers may perhaps understand this. You can hear music silently 'in your head', and that is how spirits hear. Music is more changed than vision because we hear not only the notes, but we hear (much better than you do) the limitless resonances which accompany them. We listen sometimes to concerts given by musicians on earth, and we wonder how the performers can play so well when they don't know the full result of their playing. (Some do. Composers, particularly, can be inspired to hear with the ears of love, and have said that what they hear in their minds is far, far more beautiful than any performance of it could be!) We spirits hear the spirit of the performance. ""But what do you hear with?" I asked. "Hearing seems such a very physical thing! Is it really the non-material senses of empathy and intuition that you told me about before?""Yes it is."Conversations with Walter -Walter and Betty Shepherd